The transfer of information over computer networks has become an increasingly important means by which institutions, corporations, and individuals do business. Computer networks have grown over the years from independent and isolated entities established to serve the needs of a single group into vast internets which interconnect disparate physical networks and allow them to function as a coordinated system. Currently, the largest computer network in existence is the Internet. The Internet is a worldwide interconnection of computer networks that communicate using a common protocol. Millions of computers, from low end personal computers to high end super computers, are connected to the Internet.
The Internet has emerged as a large community of electronically connected users located around the world who readily and regularly exchange significant amounts of information. The Internet continues to serve its original purposes of providing for access to and exchange of information among government agencies, laboratories, and universities for research and education. In addition, the Internet has evolved to serve a variety of interests and forums that extend beyond its original goals. In particular, the Internet is rapidly transforming into a global electronic marketplace of goods and services as well as of ideas and information.
Current paradigms for generating web site traffic, such as banner advertising, follow traditional advertising paradigms and fail to utilize the unique attributes of the Internet. In the banner advertising model, web site promoters seeking to promote and increase their web exposure often purchase space on the pages of popular commercial web sites. The web site promoters usually fill this space with a colorful graphic, known as a banner, advertising their own web site. The banner may act a hyperlink a visitor may click on to access the site. Like traditional advertising, banner advertising on the Internet is typically priced on an impression basis with advertisers paying for exposures to potential consumers. Banners may be displayed at every page access, or, on search engines, may be targeted to search terms. Nonetheless, impression-based advertising inefficiently exploits the Internet's direct marketing potential, as the click-through rate, the rate of consumer visits a banner generates to the destination site, may be quite low. Web site promoters are therefore paying for exposure to many consumers who are not interested in the product or service being promoted, as most visitors to a web site seek specific information and may not be interested in the information announced in the banner. Likewise, the banner often fails to reach interested individuals, since the banner is not generally searchable by search engines and the interested persons may not know where on the web to view the banner.
Pay for placement database search systems have been developed in which advertisers bid on the placement of their listings in search results returned to a searcher in response to a world wide web query from a searcher. Each advertiser's listing includes a search term and a bid amount. In some embodiments, each advertiser's listing includes a title, descriptive text and a clickable hyperlink or uniform resource locator (URL). The database of search listings stores many such listings, each associated with an advertiser. Upon receipt of the query, the database is searched and listings having a search term matching the query are formatted for display to the searcher as search results.
The advertisers adjust their bids or bid amounts to control the position at which their search listings are presented in the search results. The pay for placement system places search listings having higher-valued bids higher or closer to the top of the search listings. Other rules may be applied as well when positioning search listings.
For example, a more senior listing may be positioned or ranked higher than a junior listing for the same search term and same bid. Higher-ranked listings are seen by more searchers and are more likely to be clicked, producing traffic of potential customers to an advertiser's web site.
The searcher is presented with search listings based at least in part on the bid amounts. The search listings may extend over several screens or pages when formatted for viewing. As a result, higher positioned search listings are much more likely to be seen by the searcher. Moreover, some pay for placement systems have affiliate agreements whereby some of their highest-bidded search listings are presented to searchers using other general purpose search engines. Because of these affiliate agreements and similar arrangements, an advertiser's web site, if bid highly enough, may today be seen by as many as seventy-five percent of Internet users.
An advertiser wishing to attract searchers to his web site as potential customers for the advertiser's goods and services thus has an incentive to position his search listing relatively high in the search results. An advertiser may enter bids on many search terms. For search terms which are closely related to the content of the advertiser's web site, the advertiser might place relatively large bids. For less closely related search terms, the advertiser might place smaller bids. A number of strategies have been developed by advertisers to increase traffic to advertiser web sites in this manner.
Similarly, pay for placement search systems have developed tools to help the advertisers manage their bids and attract traffic. Overture Services, Inc., (now a division of Yahoo) operating a system at www.overture.com; and Google, at www.google.com, have presented advertisers with a standard bidding page accessible over the world wide web. The standard bidding page allows an advertiser to log in, display and edit all current search listings and review bids. Today, a number of other competitors including FindWhat also offer such pay for placement systems.
Despite their current popularity, however, such conventional pay for placement systems actually have a surprising number of major drawbacks. First, as a result of these systems quickly expanding recognition and use since their development in the late 1990's, combined with their having an effective limit on the number of economically viable search terms upon which advertisers are willing to bid on such systems growth rate is now predicted to decline precipitously in the years to come. Due to the popularity of and resultant often rabid bidding for the most effective and responsive search terms, many companies—especially smaller ones—are starting to drop out of such systems due to this growing lack of affordability. In fact, some experts now believe that in the years to come, as has been the case with broadcast television, only larger companies, often bidding on 100's or even 1,000's of search terms each, will be able to even afford to participate in such systems at all.
Second, as is well known in this “search engine marketing” [SEM] industry, despite these systems best efforts, attempting to match advertisements to search terms is inherently problematic when working within an unstructured environment like the Internet. Because search engines use at least in part impersonal algorithms, link analysis, and other automated methodologies to locate and present search—and advertising—results, the delivery of irrelevant or minimal-relevancy advertisements to the searcher is all too common. Indeed, attempting to discern searchers intent from the search terms they use is often characterized as being akin to trying to read their minds.
A third problem with these systems is their inability to identify those many products, services, and benefits the searchers know nothing about yet for which they may—and do—qualify to obtain, use, and benefit from. While knowing ones intent is great (if and when you can discern it), basing (so called) targeted advertising presentations on just that factor shortchanges both entities and the provider/advertisers. With such “targeted by intent only” advertising systems, it's very much a case of “if only you knew how much you don't know.”
A fourth problem is the artificial limit such systems, by their structural nature, place on the number of advertisers who can effectively obtain placement—and therefore visibility of their advertising—based on each search term. People conduct searches because they are looking for information of some type from any web site or source which might have it; and, they are not normally very patient about getting it. Numerous studies have shown that few people will view more that the first two or three pages of search results before either changing the search terms and trying again; or trying their search at one or more of the many other readily available search engines. This means that—because computer screens and therefore web pages are of limited physical/viewable size, there's only a precious few positions of any marketing value for advertisers to bid on if they expect their ads to even be seen by the searcher (or by worthwhile numbers of searchers), much less clicked on and forwarded to the advertisers web site for a potential purchase to take place.
Relatedly, because people conducting searches usually are doing so to quickly gather what they consider to be unbiased (and preferably advertising-free) information, and not to look at a bunch of ads; if they don't find the information they're actually looking for in the first few pages, as stated, they don't often stick around scrolling through pages and pages of ads stuck along the side of or amongst what to them is irrelevant content. If they don't quickly see what they're looking for in the first few pages, anything that follows is history—including any remaining ads.
A little talked about fifth problem with search engine marketing systems is “click fraud;” where clicks on the various displayed paid listings are executed either manually or via automated systems (some now very sophisticated in their operation) not due to an interest in the product or service advertised, but in order to inflict financial pain on targeted advertisers (often by their competitors, who are unfortunately able to easily identify the search terms their competition is paying for) and/or in order to gain illegal commissions for the entities (or their agents) perpetrating these frauds. Overseas “click fraud rings” have even recently sprung up to take advantage of this vulnerability. Some estimates place such fraud as high as 10-20% or more of all “hits” on the most valuable search terms and/or within the most competitive industry sectors. Such fraud; considered by many in the field to be far more widespread than is readily admitted to by the providers of such systems; may reportedly be costing many advertisers up to $100's to 10's of $1,000's of dollars a month or more.
A sixth problem with such systems is their great difficulty in delivering search results—and therefore advertisers—who are geographically local to individual searchers. While at this time SEM has become a five-billion dollar/year industry, various estimates place the total potential SEM market to be perhaps three-to-five times this amount; if only locally-based vendors were able to target their products and services only to those people within reasonable driving distance of their places of business. It doesn't do “Joe's Plumbing” any good to be one of the paying advertisers on a search term such as “plumbing,” when only a minuscule percentage of “plumbing” searchers are within Joe's geographic service area, and therefore able to take advantage of his services.
A seventh problem with SEM systems is their inherently complicated, esoteric nature. While sophisticated product and service providers have—though usually with the assistance of experts in the field—readily embraced these systems, precious few of the many millions of smaller companies and professional practices have done so. Already familiar—and comfortable—with such media as yellow pages, newspapers, direct mail; perhaps even radio and TV; they've understandably shown little interest to date in putting complicated SEM (or the related search engine optimization [SEO]) techniques and methodologies to work in their businesses—even as much additional profit doing so could mean to them. The whole complicated Internet advertising business leaves them lost and confused. As the current conventional SEM advertising systems continue to become more and more complicated as the years go on, this small-company/business disconnect only continues to grow worse.
These paid search systems eighth problem is centered around trademark infringement and related intellectual property (IP) issues. An important percentage of the words and phrases targeted by advertisers utilizing SEM systems are actually the legal product, service, and business-name trademarks of many 100's to 1,000's of companies around the world who are for the most part understandingly very displeased and “up in arms” over the use of their intellectual property by competitors and others profiting from their well-known creations. Though recent indications are that this issue may be reaching a conclusion and resolution generally favorable to those providing and utilizing such SEM systems within the US; as recently illustrated by the French court decision against one of the world's largest paid search providers, such favorable outcomes may be few and far between when it comes to other countries; most of which regularly demonstrate a greater propensity for “protecting” their established companies against real or perceived interlopers and “outsiders” than does the US.
Thus, search engine marketing (SEM) and other traditional paradigms of advertising fail both to provide maximized results to 10's of millions of businesses/advertisers, while further failing to deliver the up to 100's of little- or un-known yet valuable and useful, relevant, targeted product, service, and benefit opportunities and information to interested parties in a cost-effective manner. Internet advertising done right can offer a level of targetability, interactivity, measurability, and competitive privacy not generally available from other media. With the proper tools, technologies, and methodologies; Internet advertisers have the ability to quickly, easily, affordably, and confidentially target their messages to specific groups of consumers and receive prompt feedback as to the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns.
Ideally, web site promoters should be able to control their placement in match result listings so that their listings are prominent in match requests that are relevant to the content of their web site and/or their offerings. The match engine functionality of the Internet (i.e. GovBenefits.gov and BenefitsCheckUp.org) needs to be focused in a new direction to facilitate an on-line marketplace which offers consumers and other entities quick, easy and relevant match results while providing Internet advertisers and promoters of all sizes and revenues with a cost-effective way to target consumers. A consumer utilizing a match engine that facilitates this on-line marketplace will find companies, businesses, government and non-profit agencies, etc that offer the products, services, benefits and information that the consumer is seeking. In this on-line marketplace, companies selling or offering products, services, benefits, or information bid in an open auction environment for positions on a match result list generated by an Internet match engine.
Since advertisers must pay for each click-through referral generated through the match result lists generated by the match engine, advertisers have an incentive to select and bid on those match criteria (characteristics) which are most relevant to their web site and offerings. The higher an advertiser's position on a match result list, the higher likelihood of a “referral;” that is, the higher the likelihood that a consumer will be referred to the advertiser's web site/offerings through the match result list.
Therefore; it would be desirable then to provide a system and method which would readily reduce/mitigate/overcome the many substantial drawbacks, deficiencies, and shortcomings of the present conventional advertising paradigms.